Breakpoint
by Shunsoku
Summary: Niou likes being a bad influence. And Yagyuu likes letting him.


**Title:** Break Point (or 10 Things Yagyuu and Niou understand)  
**Fandom:** テニスの王子様  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine. Don't sue.  
**Pairing: **hints of Platinum Pair (?)  
**Rating:** PG  
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1. They aren't even in the same classes. Which might explain why it took so long for Niou to notice him. With a tennis club the size of Rikkai's (no where near the absurdity that was Hyoutei gakuen – but quality over quantity, buchou insisted), it was easy to ignore one of the many students with straight brown hair and plain glasses.

Sure, Niou's heard the rumors. He knows about the Gentleman, Yagyuu Hiroshi, the Public Morals committee representative who is calm, reserved, and perfectly controlled.

Niou plays him one day at practice. They make it to 6-6, tie-break, before the coach comes over, long after club has long since ended, to break up the exhausting match. Niou looks across the net, gasping and clinging to his knees, to face his opponent. Brown hair is disheveled and sweaty, glasses are sliding down a slim, straight nose, and the team uniform is clinging unpleasantly in wet spots.

This is no Gentleman, Niou decides, shivering at the intense gaze freezing him in place. However, Niou thinks he may have finally met the real Yagyuu Hiroshi.

2. Some days, Yagyuu wonders why he was ever partnered with someone as dangerous and unpredictable as Niou. Then he sees raging passion and a spark of mischief in Niou's eyes just behind the borrowed lenses and realizes that he is no longer looking at Niou's expression slipping from behind his Yagyuu-mask. He is instead looking at the Yagyuu that Niou sees, the man Niou has awakened into being.

3. Niou has, at one point, imitated every one of the regulars at Yanagi's bequest but Yagyuu has never imitated another team member. He and Kaido may have succeeded in their switch at beating some ignorant fools, but Kaido is not Niou. Niou is his doubles partner and after all, doubles partners have to trust one another, or so Yukimura said. After three weeks lost in the wilderness with Niou, trying to escape one of Sanada's forced bonding sessions during the summer break, Yagyuu trusts Niou even less than he did before but is now beginning to realize that he may actually respect the trickster. Just a little.

4. Niou knows they are not the Golden Pair. Those two are the supposed pinnacle of doubles, the goal to reach. The amount of trust Kikumaru and Oishi have for one another is unbreakable. The threat they represent is insurmountable. But Niou knows better. He and Yagyuu beat them, and now, they are purer than gold, stronger than steel. They are gods, and Niou likes that. A lot.

5. The dichotomy is what usually catches their opponents off guards. Yagyuu's partner is the flamboyant one, the energetic, people person. Surely he's the one reading all of their moves. After all, Yagyuu seems so cold and ambivalent to people's emotions. His team knows better. Sure, Niou understands people: he knows how to trick them. And every game, Niou tricks his opponent into believing that Yagyuu is the planner, the one watching ten steps ahead. Yagyuu is just a partner to that deception.

6. Niou likes math. Kirihara often asks why, given that his senpai is such a free spirit (exact words: spaz), he would come to love something as controlled and certain as mathematics. Yagyuu smirks. He knows, of course. Sometimes Niou thinks Yagyuu knows everything about him, and that's a little terrifying, because even Niou doesn't know Niou. But, Niou knows why he loves math. It's not the shocked, appalled, or entertained looks he gets from his teammates whenever a test result is posted and Niou is head of the class. It's definitely not because math is methodical. Because, really, to Niou, it's not. Math is tennis.

The court, and placement of the players, that's all geometry. Movement is calculus, trigonometry. The wait and the anticipation, that's all algebra. Niou has never liked algebra: full of uncertainty and incompleteness. Algebra has no place in Niou's tennis.

7. Their classrooms are only one door apart, but that makes all the difference in the world. Yagyuu never sees Niou during the school day, aside from occasional passings in the hallway. Occasionally, their eyes will make contact at lunch, but they never eat together. Yagyuu has class representative responsibilities, and Niou far prefers the rooftop.

The have morning practice, and afternoon practice, and weekend practice. Seven days a week, Yagyuu eats, sleeps, and breathes tennis right alongside his teammates, and reminds himself that this is necessary to win Nationals. All Yagyuu needs to know about his partner, he learns from this tennis. He understands his movements, his tone of voice, the way he tilts his head just―so, to indicate his devious plans. Yagyuu does not know Niou's family, has never been to his house, and does not, in fact, even know where the other boy lives.

Team bonding exercises have no place in Yagyuu and Niou's doubles play. Let the Golden Pair of Seigaku have their synchronicity. Yagyuu does not want to understand his partner completely. He does not need to.

8. Niou doesn't like switching up the doubles pairs, or playing singles for that matter. Yukimura insists that in order to become better players, they have to learn to play "outside their comfort zone." Niou thinks it's a load of bull. When Niou plays with Marui, he spends too much time teasing his teammate, while when he plays with Yanagi, he spends the match struggling to break free of the stifling control Yanagi exerts on the court. However, when Yagyuu's his partner, Niou has a partner in crime, a person who understands him well enough to be him.

Yagyuu is perfectly comfortable with the rationale behind playing alongside other team members. However, he far prefers to play alongside Niou than either Jackal, who doesn't challenge him enough, or Kirihara, who tries his patience (more so than Niou, which is a skill). Playing with Niou feels like it once did when Yagyuu rode his bike too fast down a steep hill. At the start, he feels confident and in control, but the minute the speed of the match picks up, he realizes that he is playing at Niou's speed, that the other boy is dragging him down further and further towards their win. It's exhilarating.

9. Niou's future is bleak, at least by most people's standards. He's smart, but the problem is often that he is too well aware of this fact. Sanada has long since given up on Niou. Unlike Akaya, loss does not encourage a change in Niou's actions. It will take more than a genius with brown hair and blue eyes to turn him from his path. Besides, there's another genius who has tried time and time again, until he realized that Niou doesn't change. He adapts to a situation, but he will never change.

Maybe Yagyuu doesn't want him to.

10. The selection match was only the beginning of the split. Niou has always known who the more dangerous of the pair is. Himself, of course. But perhaps the switch has rubbed off on Yagyuu more than previously expected, because that level of insight is damn near diabolical. Niou rubs his bleeding leg through the gauze and contemplates sulking.

But Yagyuu flashed him Niou's smirk, and that means that everything is okay.

Niou likes being a bad influence.


End file.
